We’ve been enjoying the spring here in Albany. Lot’s of grilling in the parks and a little bit of hiking. We ran out to Utica to visit Matt’s Brewery – the place that makes Sanarac beer, my favorite beer! It was a very fun visit and had “Strange Flavor Chicken” at a local Chinese restaurant. I also found a great spot to take photos of downtown Albany at night!
Enjoy the pictures!
Chris W.
Well, the trip is just about over. It’s been interesting to see a lot of different things and try different foods. The oddest food I at was actually a fruit called Durian. Very hard to describe, I recommend everyone try it at least once.
I added some photos that didn’t easily fit any particular album – they are the odd things that I saw while I was in China, including a wedding shop area in the subway station below People’s Square and a lot of people trying to find their children spouses. This trip was a great experience but I’m ready to go home :).
Enjoy the pictures! Chris W.
I have never had any experiences with monsoons. This trip brought me to Shenzhen where I had my first monsoon experience complete with flooding factories (I happened to be in the factory), river fording in a van, and flight issues. It was completely unlike any weather phenomena I’ve ever experienced. I’ve been in hard rain but it’s usually quite short in duration – I’ve never seen hard rain for hours on end. It was unreal!
Shenzhen itself has a pretty weird layout. There are mountains all over the place so it disrupts the urban sprawl and there many tall buildings all over the area in smaller conglomerations. It just means that it takes a bit longer to get different places.
Enjoy the pictures :).
Chris W.
Shanghai is a phenomenally interesting city. One quickly notices how everything is illuminated at night – buildings, road, trees, and so on. It goes on forever, it’s absolutely incredible! I haven’t been to many areas of China, but, from what I can tell, it’s not typical. The only other city that comes remotely close is Hong Kong; however, in typical Chinese fashion, it’s bigger, better, and brighter in Shanghai.
I decided to watch the sunset on the really tall buildings from the Bund. I took a timelapse video of the whole ordeal which can be found here: Shanghai timelapse. It’s a pretty big file (~60MB) so give it a bit to load.
Enjoy the lights :).
Chris W.
I ran over to Suzhou and Zhangzhou, just outside of Shanghai, with a tour group. Suzhou is a more laid back city and a ‘small’ city at 6mil people. The water village was pretty awesome, I’ve never seen anything like it. While very touristy, people are still using the village for their livelihood. Plenty to see, plenty to do.
Enjoy the pictures :).
Chris W.
Leaving to China from Albany is surprisingly complicated. There aren’t a lot of good flight times from Albany and it’s a lot more expensive to fly from the east coast of the US to China. So, I decided to route my trip through Vancouver and get a free afternoon in the city to run around. It was more spectacular than I thought – very beautiful, it smelled great, lots of places to eat, plenty of things to see and, of course, everyone’s very nice!
While walking around, I heard a local remark, “we finally have a nice day”. I’m glad that “nice day” happened to be when I was there!
Enjoy the pictures.
Chris W.
The New York area was originally colonized by the Dutch. Given that, there’s still a lot of Dutch things happening around the area. One of those things is the annual tulip festival in Washington Park. Many thousands of tulips of many different varieties along with lots of food and other entertainment. It was a fun time!
Enjoy the pictures.
Chris W.
Enjoy the photos!
Chris W.
We had a quick trip down to New York City at the beginning of April. We walked around a lot and went to a new area that we’ve never been in – the Tennement district. The best part was going up Rockefeller Center and looking out over the city at night – very cool! Oh, and I slipped two photos of Chicago into this. Enjoy the photos!
So March is here and supposedly winter will be ending. Lot’s of snow here in New York and it’s been cold in Chicago. The standard unit of snowfall in this area is around a foot; if I see a forecast for snow in Albany I figure we’re getting about a foot, probably more. It’s not windy so the snow simply accumulates and is really pretty.
I picked up a 36MP full frame DSLR with a wide angle lens and have had a chance to put it thru some paces. Compared to my Canon point and shoot, the DSLR is amazing!
I had a chance to see some sights in Albany and Chicago over the last few weeks and the pictures are below. A few notes:
Enjoy the pictures.
Chris W.
